Demanding a biological basis for gender identity

Some years ago I read about a male pastor who was kicked out of his denomination because it came out that he sometimes wanted to identify as a woman. Most of the time he was fine with presenting himself as a man, but some of the time he wanted to present as a woman and even chose a female name for that part of himself.

His church freaked out, of course, and gave him the ax. Yet there was a reasonable explanation for this pastor's behavior. Before he was born, when he was still in his mother's womb, he had a fraternal twin sister. Instead of separating and becoming another person, she somehow ended up fusing back with him so that the two of them formed a single person. As a result he was, in his biological make up, 70% male and 30% female. There is even a term for someone who is has two different sets of DNA as a result of absorbing a fraternal twin back into their body in utero: human chimera.

In the current debate over transgender people, many Christians are saying that it is just plain common sense that if someone is biologically male then he should view himself as male, and if someone is biologically female then she should see herself as female. Period. With no room for debate. If this were an ideal, unfallen world prior to Genesis chapter 3, I would heartily agree. But here and now, living in this messy, fallen state of humankind, it is not so. Instead we have this case of a pastor who was biologically both male and female. If biology directly determines one's personal sense of gender self-identity, then this pastor was being true to that principle. Even the proportion of time he wanted to spend as male versus female was true to the proportion that he was biologically male versus female.

Yet the reason this pastor was run out of his denomination was that he looked physically male and therefore he was expected to act and identify as such exclusively. The basis for his wanting to identify partly as female was hidden from the human eye, and yet it was very real. It could even have been scientifically proven through genetic testing.

In the case of transgender individuals, just because the basis for their desire to identify with a gender opposite of their (apparent) biological sex is hidden from our eyes, that doesn't mean it isn't real. Are we really so arrogant that we can dismiss this crisis of identity that they feel, as if we know everything there is to know about human beings, our mysterious formation in the womb, the human brain, genetics, and the origins of gender identity? The discovery that human chimeras exist is a relatively recent one. Who knows what else there is to discover about ourselves as human beings?

Here's something else to consider. Why do Christians need to know if there is a scientific explanation for the transgender experience before we stop our mistreatment of them: this merciless sneering and mocking and condemning of people whom we have made zero effort to understand? I thought the Bible was the basis of everything we do. We already know that Jesus commanded us to love people and refrain from judging them, because after all we do not see the heart and have no idea what sort of challenges they may be facing.

Of course, we can always wait around for science to uncover the reasons for the transgender experience--someday--before we feel like taking seriously Jesus' command to love these people. It's just that, given the way we normally scorn modern science almost as much as we do transgender people, I think that would be extremely ironic.

Discomfort level

I just heard recently that a gay Christian friend of mine is going to be leaving his conservative church. Even though he is not in a gay relationship and never has been, he is being shunned by a core group of people in the congregation. The only excuse they have given for the way they treat him is, "We're not at a place where we feel comfortable interacting with gay people."

Sure, I get it. That's my favorite Bible verse too. The one that says, "They will know that we are Christians by the way we love only those brothers and sisters with whom we have come to a place where we feel comfortable interacting."

Which also brings to mind some of my favorite passages out of the Gospels where Jesus goes around touching, healing, befriending and sharing meals only with the people with whom he had gotten to a place where he felt comfortable interacting. Because if you want to change the world, that's the winning formula right there.

Speaking of changing the world, I can't recall any time in church history where the gospel caught fire and spread because Christians were interacting only with those respectable people with whom they felt comfortable. Saint Patrick, who is credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland, largely ministered to slave girls who suffered being raped regularly by their masters. John Wycliffe was the first to translate the Bible in English for the benefit of lay people, whom the church of his day regarded as "swine." John and Charles Wesley were condemned by the clergy of their day for preaching the gospel in open fields to the uneducated masses.

If there's any spiritual lesson to be learned from the past, it is run, don't walk, from any temptation to center your Christian life around being comfortable, respectable and insulated. No great spiritual advancement has ever happened in the kingdom of God because Christians were afraid to love the really tough-to-love people.

Which is why there's hope for my gay Christian friends, because I see so many of them struggling to love their straight brothers and sisters in Christ in spite of our perverse ignorance and obnoxious self-righteousness. From a certain perspective we are the really tough-to-love people, not them. We need to understand the true nature of our spiritual situation. If we don't get our act together and learn how to love, the kingdom will surely march forward without us. And gay Christians will be leading the way.

Am I being sentimental or hyperbolic when I say that? Let me put it this way. If you want to know how God is working to advance his kingdom, observe what he is doing among the people on the margins. The poor, the homeless, the persecuted, the forsaken, the ill, the feeble, and the despised. God calls his people from within those situations and uses suffering to train them in love, forgiveness, patience and meekness. They may never get to be senior pastor at the newest megachurch everyone is flocking to. They may never even be allowed to lead a Bible study. They may struggle just to be accepted in their churches. But they are the ones whom Christ will lift up, they are the ones he will strengthen, and they are the ones he will reveal himself to. If you despise them, you do so at your own spiritual peril.

Betrayed by whom?

Explain this to me, please.

I’ve seen or heard of several cases like this. A couple in the church has been married for 20+ years, when the husband comes out and admits he is gay. The wife is, of course, devastated. Family and church members rally around her. Obviously she is hurt, she is distressed, she is angry—who wouldn’t be? Her whole life has been turned upside down. Her whole marriage has been revealed to be, essentially, a sham, or at least not what she thought it was. Then she and all her supporters turn on the gay husband and accuse him of “lying to” and “betraying” her.

Strictly speaking, they are right about the lying. It is true that the husband was not honest with her, his family and his church about his homosexuality all those years. He may not have even been honest with himself. So I guess that means everyone would have much preferred that he had come out with the truth about his struggles with homosexual feelings from the very start, right? Gosh, why do you suppose he might not have had much incentive to do that? It couldn’t be all the sermons he’d heard over the years from the pulpit condemning homosexuals as perverted, depraved, abominable, sick, pedophilic, sexual predators, now, could it? Or maybe he should have been encouraged to greater honesty by the way he saw fellow Christians squirm, scowl, sneer and jeer every time the subject of homosexuality came up in casual conversation. Sure, I’d want to spill my guts about my struggles too in the midst of company like that.

And what’s the deal with this “betrayal” he is supposedly guilty of? Everyone who is a part of the conservative church knows that the standard counsel given to those who struggle with homosexual inclinations is that they are encouraged to mortify their flesh and kick-start their true heterosexual nature by getting married and continuing to have sex with their opposite-sex partner until something magically clicks. So how did the husband “betray” his wife, his family and his fellow Christians by taking the church’s advice so completely to heart? He was doing exactly what he was being told to do. And now that this advice has been proven wrong twenty years later, is that all his fault?

Now that the guy is at the end of his rope, his homosexuality having never gone away, his marriage falling apart, he and his family suffering public humiliation, somehow I don’t see his pastor and elders coming up to him and taking responsibility for what happened. I don’t see them approaching him humbly, slapping their foreheads and saying, “Jimmy John, we are so, so sorry! That advice we’ve been dishing out all these years about using marriage to try to change people's homosexual desires is so obviously wrong! Could you and your wife ever forgive us for the part we played in ruining your lives with that completely asinine counsel? And would you be so gracious as to join a committee we are setting up to rewrite our church’s policy on how to pastor and counsel homosexual members in our church?”

But no. Instead what I’ve seen is that the gay husband is somehow to blame for everything. For following the godly advice of his spiritual leaders. For trying to live up to his “true” heterosexual nature. For demonstrating at tremendous cost to himself, his wife and his kids that the church is entirely mistaken about the nature of homosexuality. It’s a good thing he’s gay and everyone hates him already, because it makes it all the easier to cover the church’s rear-end by scapegoating him.